On October 30, 2008 at Cooper Union in New York City, Angela Davis presented a lecture, “Abolition Democracy and Global Politics,” sponsored by the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. The event was held in the final days before the 2008 election, and Davis underscores the historic importance of Barack Obama’s candidacy and the collective struggles that made it possible. However, she reminds us that the election does not represent the culmination or final victory of the civil rights movement. Questions of race have remained conspicuously absent in the discourse of the election, and in the United States, the affirmation of civil rights for the purportedly universal rights-bearing citizen has always entailed the violent exclusion of others who attain such rights only through militant challenges to the status quo: enslaved persons, women, indigenous peoples, felons and ex-felons, and undocumented immigrants, among others. As Davis reiterates, civil rights must not be understood as the condition of possibility for freedom, but rather, must be recognized through the processes of their divestment in forms of civil death.
“Obama’s Collective Victory,” a video comprised of excerpts from Davis’s lecture, as well as full-length video footage follow.
Obama’s Collective Victory
Angela Davis: Obama’s Collective Victory from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.
Excerpts from the lecture “Abolition Democracy and Global Politics,” delivered on October 30, 2008 at The Great Hall, The Cooper Union.
Full-length vodeo
Angela Davis from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.
This is the full-length video of Angela Davis’s lecture “Abolition Democracy and Global Politics,” delivered on October 30, 2008 at The Great Hall, The Cooper Union.
